Einstein Quotes

Genius is when an idea and the execution of that idea are simultaneous. ~ Albert Einstein

Numerous are the academic chairs, but rare are wise and noble teachers. Numerous and large are the lecture halls, but far from numerous the young people who genuinely thirst for truth and justice. Numerous are the wares that nature produces by the dozen, but her choice products are few.
We all know that, so why complain? Was it not always thus and will it not always thus remain? Certainly, and one must take what nature gives as one finds it. But there is also such a thing as a spirit of the times, an attitude of mind characteristic of a particular generation, which is passed on from individual to individual and gives its distinctive mark to a society. Each of us has to his little bit toward transforming this spirit of the times. ~ Albert Einstein

If you could buckle your Bugs Bunny wristwatch to a ray of light, your watch would continue ticking but the hands wouldn't move. That's because at the speed of light there is no time. Time is relative to velocity. At high speeds, time is literally stretched. Since light is the ultimate in velocity, at light-speed time is stretched to its absolute and becomes static. Albert Einstein figured that one out. ~ Tom Robbins

We will know which stars to visit. Our descendants will then skim the light years, the children of Thales and Aristarchus, Leonardo and Einstein. ~ Carl Sagan

During this time I had the singular good fortune of being able to discuss the problem constantly with Einstein. Some experiments done at Einstein's suggestion yielded no decisively new result. ~ Walther Bothe

Scientific research is based on the idea that everything that takes place is determined by laws of nature, and therefore this holds for the action of people. For this reason, a research scientist will hardly be inclined to believe that events could be influenced by a prayer, i.e. by a wish addressed to a Supernatural Being.
- Albert Einstein, 1936, responding to a child who wrote and asked if scientists pray; quoted in: Albert Einstein: The Human Side, edited by Helen Dukas & Banesh Hoffmann ~ Albert Einstein

To quote Albert Einstein,' said Sherman, "You stink and so do your relatives."
"Einstein never said that," argued Garfield.
"Did too," Insisted Sherman. "It's in his theory of relativity. ~ Jim Kraft

Force always attracts men of low morality. ~ Albert Einstein

Relativity is a purely scientific matter and has nothing to do with religion. ~ Albert Einstein

Nationalism, on my opinion, is nothing more than an idealistic rationalization for militarism and aggression. ~ Albert Einstein

The mere act of dreaming is a vitalizing, life-affirming endeavor. As it turns out, using your imagination is very, very good for your wellbeing. Einstein believed that imagination was even more important than knowledge itself. ~ Danielle LaPorte

Kaluza also gave an answer as to where the fifth dimension was. Since we see no evidence of a fifth dimension, it must have "curled up" so small that it cannot be observed. (Imagine taking a two-dimensional sheet of paper and rolling it up tightly into a cylinder. From a distance, the cylinder looks like a one-dimensional line. In this way, a two-dimensional object has been turned into a one-dimensional object by curling it up.)

Kaluza's paper initially created a sensation. But in the coming years, objections were found to his theory. What was the size of this new fifth dimension? How did it curl up? No answers could be found.

For decades Einstein would work on this theory in fits and starts. After he passed away in 1955, the theory was soon forgotten, becoming just a strange footnote to the evolution of physics. ~ Michio Kaku

I have read various articles on the fourth dimension, the relativity theory of Einstein, and other psychological speculation on the constitution of the universe; and after reading them I feel as Senator Brandegee felt after a celebrated dinner in Washington. "I feel," he said, "as if I had been wandering with Alice in Wonderland and had tea with the Mad Hatter." ~ Charles Lane Poor

Black holes are where God divided by zero. ~ Albert Einstein

Now the truth of the matter is that there are a lot of things people don't understand. Take the Einstein theory. Take taxes. Take love. Do you understand them? Neither do I. But they exist. They happen. ~ Dalton Trumbo

What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of humility. This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism. ~ Albert Einstein

Although I tried to be universal in thought, I am European by instinct and inclination. ~ Albert Einstein

By the power of the Tri-Force, I command you to
~ Prashna Bari

I sometimes ask myself how it came about that I was the one to develop the theory of relativity. The reason, I think, is that a normal adult never stops to think about problems of space and time. These are things which he has thought about as a child. Bu t my intellectual development was retarded,as a result of which I began to wonder about space and time only when I had already grown up. ~ Albert Einstein

Unlimited competition leads to a huge waste of labor, and to that crippling of the social consciousness of individuals. ~ Albert Einstein

It would be foolish to despise tradition. But with our growing self-consciousness and increasing intelligence we must begin to control tradition and assume a critical attitude toward it, if human relations are ever to change for the better. ~ Albert Einstein

A life directed chiefly toward the fulfillment of personal desires will sooner or later always lead to bitter disappointment. ~ Albert Einstein

I often wonder what Einstein would have done in my position. At Peterson, I kept an Einstein poster in my room, the one that says 'Imagination is more important than knowledge.' Einstein was smart, maybe even as smart as Laserator, but he played it way too safe. Then again, nobody ever threw a grappling hook at Einstein. I like to think he would have enjoyed my work, if he could have seen it. But no one sees anything I do, not until it's hovering over Chicago. ~ Austin Grossman

Analytics will never tell you everything you want to know. ~ Albert Einstein

If I had it [life] to do all over again, I'd have been a plumber. ~ Albert Einstein

The ability to portray people in still life and in motion requires the highest measure of intuition and talent. ~ Albert Einstein

There was one man who was interested in the color of music, the connection between light and music, and that was Einstein. ~ Leon Theremin

Einstein, in the special theory of relativity, proved that different observers, in different states of motion, see different realities. ~ Leonard Susskind

External conditions can, to a certain extent, reduce, but never cancel individual repsonsibility. ~ Albert Einstein

I'm an Einstein of the streets and an Oxford scholar of common sense. ~ Al McGuire

Even today, I am in total awe of the following wondrous chain of ideas and interconnections. Guided throughout by principles of symmetry, Einstein first showed that acceleration and gravity are really two sides of the same coin. He then expanded the concept to demonstrate that gravity merely reflects the geometry of spacetime. The instruments he used to develop the theory were Riemann's non-Euclidean geometries-precisely the same geometries used by Felix Klein to show that geometry is in fact a manifestation of group theory (because every geometry is defined by its symmetries-the objects it leaves unchanged). Isn't this amazing? ~ Mario Livio

Intelligence makes clear to us the interrelationship of means and ends. But mere thinking cannot give us a sense of the ultimate and fundamental ends. To make clear these fundamental ends and valuations and to set them fast in the emotional life of the individual, seems to me precisely the most important function which religion has to form in the social life of man. ~ Albert Einstein

You believe in the God who plays dice, and I in complete law and order in a world that objectively exists, and which I, in a wildly speculative way, am trying to capture ... Even the great initial success of the quantum theory does not make me believe in the fundamental dice-game, although I am well aware that our younger colleagues interpret this as a consequence of senility. No doubt the day will come when we will see whose instinctive attitude was the correct one. ~ Albert Einstein

It is the theory that decides what can be observed. ~ Albert Einstein

So it is not an accident that the Nazi lads vent a particular fury against (Einstein). He does truly stand for what they most dislike, the opposite of the blond beast intellectualist, individualist, supernationalist, pacifist, inky, plump ... How should they know the glory of the free-ranging intellect and soft objective sympathy to whom money and violence, drink and blood and pomp, mean absolutely nothing? ~ John Maynard Keynes

Intuitive powers played a central role in my scientific work, not wild speculation, yet a valued resource when no other approach was available. ~ Albert Einstein

The consequence was a positively fanatic [orgy of] freethinking coupled with the impression that youth is being deceived by the state through lies; it was a crushing impression ~ Albert Einstein

There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle. ~ Albert Einstein

If I were given one hour to save the world, I would spend 50 minutes defining the problem. ~ Albert Einstein

Since our inner experiences consist of reproductions, and combinations of sensory impressions, the concept of a soul without a body seem to me to be empty and devoid of meaning. ~ Albert Einstein

When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. ~ Albert Einstein

When you create you get a little endorphin rush. Why do you think Einstein looked like that? ~ Robin Williams

As Einstein said, 'If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed. ' Michael Shermer, In The Science of Good and Evil, calls it a debate stopper. If you agree that, in the absence of God, you would 'commit robbery, rape, and murder', you reveal yourself as an immoral person, 'and we would be well advised to steer a wide course around you'. If, on the other hand, you admit that you would continue to be a good person even when not under divine surveillance, you have fatally undermined your claim that God is necessary for us to be good. ~ Richard Dawkins

Einstein has a feeling for the central order of things. He can detect it in the simplicity of natural laws. We may take it that he felt this simplicity very strongly and directly during his discovery of the theory of relativity. Admittedly, this is a far cry from the contents of religion. I don't believe Einstein is tied to any religious tradition, and I rather think the idea of a personal God is entirely foreign to him. ~ Wolfgang Pauli

When you trip over love, it is easy to get up. But when you fall in love, it is impossible to stand again." ~Albert Einstein ~ R.K. Lilley

We must learn to see the world anew. ~ Albert Einstein

Games are the most elevated form of investigation. ~ Albert Einstein

Einstein felt that he did not have great mathematical gifts and deliberately chose not to take courses and to continue in that area.

The fact that I neglected mathematics to a certain extent had its causes not merely in my stronger interest in science than in mathematics but also in the following strange experience....I saw that mathematics was split up into numerous specialties, each of which could easily absorb the short lifetime granted to us....In physics, however, I soon learned to scent out that which was able to lead to fundamentals and to turn aside from everything else, from the multitude of things that clutter up the mind and divert it from the essential.

This capacity to pick out important issues dovetailed with Einstein's search for the most general possible conception. "In a man of my type," he declared, "the turning point of the development lies in the fact that gradually the major interest disengages itself to a far reaching degree from the momentary and the merely personal and turns toward the striving for a mental grasp of things. ~ Howard Gardner

One day someone called the Institute and asked to speak to a particular dean. When his secretary said that the dean wasn't available, the caller hesitantly asked for Einstein's home address. That was not possible to give out, he was informed. The caller's voice then dropped to a whisper. "Please don't tell anybody," he said, "but I am Dr. Einstein, I'm on my way home, and I've forgotten where my house is."40 ~ Walter Isaacson

His ruby red rimmed moist eyes were two glasses of cranberry. He wore a cashmere sweater the color of Earl Grey tea ... ~ Brandi L. Bates

It's clearly possible for a something to acquire higher intelligence than its ancestors: we evolved to be smarter than our ape-like ancestors, and Einstein was smarter than his parents. ~ Stephen Hawking

History is littered with examples of men who would become gods, but only one example of God becoming Man. ~ Albert Einstein

The mind that opens to a new idea never returns to its original size ~ Albert Einstein

True knowledge comes with deep understanding of a topic and its inner workings. ~ Albert Einstein

He thought about history, the hidden human anxieties behind momentous events. The tiny trivial things that were probably bothering Einstein or Darwin or Newton as they formulated their theories: arguments with the landlady, maybe, or concern over a blocked fireplace. The pilots who bombed Dresden, fretting over a phrase in a letter from back home: What did she mean by that? Or what about Columbus, when he was sailing toward the New Land ... who knows what was on his mind? The last words spoken to him by an old friend, perhaps, a person not even remembered in history books ... ~ Michel Faber

To be free means to be independent, not to be influenced by what others think and say. ~ Albert Einstein

If what is seen and experienced is portrayed in the language of logic, then it is science. If it is communicated through forms whose connections are not accessible to the conscious mind but are recognized intuitively, then it is art. ~ Albert Einstein

The leader is one who, out of the clutter, brings simplicity ... out of discord, harmony ... and out of difficulty, opportunity. ~ Albert Einstein

Nature conceals her secrets because she is sublime, not because she is a trickster. ~ Albert Einstein

All men are ignorant, just in different fields. ~ Albert Einstein

It is a very high goal which, with our weak powers, we can reach only very inadequately, but which gives a sure foundation to our aspirations and valuations. ~ Albert Einstein

Animistic savages prostrating themselves before a painted stone have always seemed to me to be nearer the truth than any Einstein or Bertrand Russell. As it might be pigs in a crowded sty, jostling and shoving to bury their snouts in the trough; until one of them momentarily lifts his snout upwards in the air, in so doing expressing the hope of all enlightenment to come; breaking off from his guzzling to point with his lifted snout to where the angels and archangels gather round God's throne. ~ Malcolm Muggeridge

When you write biographies, whether it's about Ben Franklin or Einstein, you discover something amazing: They are human. ~ Walter Isaacson

The normal objective of my thought affords no insight into the dark places of human will and feeling. ~ Albert Einstein

Why is it I always get my best ideas while shaving? ~ Albert Einstein

Don't dream of being a good person, be a human being is valuable and gives value to life. ~ Albert Einstein

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one. ~ Albert Einstein

Well, I have considered myself to be very fortunate in that I have been able to do mostly only that which my inner self told me to do ... I am also aware that I do receive much criticism from the outside world for what I do and some people actually get angry at me. But this does not really touch me because I feel that these people do not live in he same world as do I. ~ Albert Einstein

Life is a preparation for the future; and the best preparation for the future is to live as if there were none. ~ Albert Einstein

Without "ethical culture", there is no salvation for humanity. ~ Albert Einstein

The world has changed far more in the past 100 years than in any other century in history. The reason is not political or economic but technological-technologies that flowed directly from advances in basic science. Clearly, no scientist better represents those advances than Albert Einstein: TIME's Person of the Century. ~ Stephen Hawking

I'm in the back of a limousine with Charlie Chaplin and it's 1928. Charlie is beautiful; his body language seems to skip, and reel and rhyme, heartbreaking and witty at the same time. It seems to promise a better world. ~ Geoff Ryman

Beware of flatterers, especially when they come preaching hatred. ~ Albert Einstein

It is easier to denature plutonium than to denature the evil spirit of man. ~ Albert Einstein

Concern for man himself must always constitute the chief objective of all technological effort ~ Albert Einstein

The economists will have to revise their theories of value. ~ Albert Einstein

[The golden proportion] is a scale of proportions which makes the bad difficult [to produce] and the good easy. ~ Albert Einstein

Empty away your many thoughts to make room for more needed material instead of thoughts that we will never use. Einstein ~ Albert Einstein

Second, the teacher should be given extensive liberty in the selection of the material to be taught and the methods of teaching employed by him. For it is true also of him that pleasure in the shaping of his work is killed by force and exterior pressure. ~ Albert Einstein

(a) A writer always wears glasses and never combs his hair. Half the time he feels angry about everything and the other half depressed. He spends most of his life in bars, arguing with other dishevelled, bespectacled writers. He says very 'deep' things. He always has amazing ideas for the plot of his next novel, and hates the one he has just published.
(b) A writer has a duty and an obligation never to be understood by his own generation; convinced, as he is, that he has been born into an age of mediocrity, he believes that being understood would mean losing his chance of ever being considered a genius. A writer revises and rewrites each sentence many times. The vocabulary of the average man is made up of 3,000 words; a real writer never uses any of these, because there are another 189,000 in the dictionary, and he is not the average man.
(c) Only other writers can understand what a writer is trying to say. Even so, he secretly hates all other writers, because they are always jockeying for the same vacancies left by the history of literature over the centuries. And so the writer and his peers compete for the prize of 'most complicated book': the one who wins will be the one who has succeeded in being the most difficult to read.
(d) A writer understands about things with alarming names, like semiotics, epistemology, neoconcretism. When he wants to shock someone, he says things like: 'Einstein is a fool', or 'Tolstoy was the clown of the bourgeoisie.' Everyone is ~ Paulo Coelho

The myth of quantum consciousness sits well with many whose egos have made it impossible for them to accept the insignificant place science perceives for humanity, as modern instruments probe the farthest reaches of space and time. ... quantum consciousness has about as much substance as the aether from which it is composed. Early in this century, quantum mechanics and Einstein's relativity destroyed the notion of a holistic universe that had seemed within the realm of possibility in the century just past. First, Einstein did away with the aether, shattering the doctrine that we all move about inside a universal, cosmic fluid whose excitations connect us simultaneously to one another and to the rest of the universe. Second, Einstein and other physicists proved that matter and light were composed of particles, wiping away the notion of universal continuity. Atomic theory and quantum mechanics demonstrated that everything, even space and time, exists in discrete bits – quanta. To turn this around and say that twentieth century physics initiated some new holistic view of the universe is a complete misrepresentation of what actually took place. ... The myth of quantum consciousness should take its place along with gods, unicorns, and dragons as yet another product of the fantasies of people unwilling to accept what science, reason, and their own eyes tell them about the world. ~ Victor J. Stenger

The State is made for Mankind, not mankind for the state ~ Albert Einstein

[On Einstein:] You cannot analyze him, otherwise you will misjudge him. Such a genius should be irreproachable in every respect. But no, nature doesn't behave like this. Where she gives extravagantly, she takes away extravagantly. ~ Elsa Einstein

[Capitalism] as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of evils. I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals. In such an economy, the means of production are owned by society itself and are utilized in a planned fashion. ~ Albert Einstein

There is a driving force more powerful than steam, electricity and nuclear power: the will. ~ Albert Einstein

Imagine if Steve Jobs or Thomas Edison or Albert Einstein were all alive 10, 20, 30 years before we know them to be alive; it would have advanced the world that much sooner. ~ Marc Guggenheim

An oligarchy of private capital cannot be effectively checked even by a democratically organized political society because under existing conditions, private capitalists inevitably control, directly or indirectly, the main sources of information. ~ Albert Einstein

For many scientists less divinely gifted than Einstein,the chief reward for being a scientist is not the power and the money but the chance of catching a glimpse of the transcendent beauty of nature. ~ Freeman Dyson

Every positive value has its price in negative terms ... the genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima. ~ Pablo Picasso

Within the modified equations, Kaluza found the ones Einstein had already used successfully to describe gravity in the familiar three dimensions of space and one of time. But because his new formulation included an additional dimension of space, Kaluza found an additional equation. Lo and behold, when Kaluza derived this equation he recognized it as the very one Maxwell had discovered half a century earlier to describe the electromagnetic field. ~ Brian Greene

Since 99.362% of women love mustache rides, it seems only a fool would have a bare upper lip. ~ Albert Einstein

The world as we have created it is a process of our thinking. It cannot be changed without changing our thinking. ~ Albert Einstein

Every true theorist is a kind of tamed metaphysicist. ~ Albert Einstein

Well-being and happiness never appeared to me as an absolute aim. I am even inclined to compare such moral aims to the ambitions of a pig. ~ Albert Einstein

Einstein wondered if the moon would exist if we didn't look at it. ~ Jenny Offill

So long as there are men, there will be wars. ~ Albert Einstein

If I had only one hour to save the world, I would spend fifty-five minutes defining the problem, and only five minutes finding the solution. ~ Albert Einstein

Once you can accept the universe as matter expanding into nothing that is something, wearing stripes with plaid comes easy. ~ Albert Einstein

The highest principles for our aspirations and judgments are given to us in the Jewish-Christian religious tradition. ~ Albert Einstein

Turkish soldiers are very brave. They love their homeland and they do not hesitate to give their lives for it if necessary. ~ Albert Einstein